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1708Accountability or Good DecisionsGlobal Society 23 (1): 37-57. 2009.Civil society participation in international and European governance is often promoted as a remedy to its much-lamented democratic deficit. We argue in this paper that this claim needs refinement because civil society participation may serve two quite different purposes: it may either enhance the democratic accountability of intergovernmental organisations and regimes, or the epistemic quality of rules and decisions made within them. (...)
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1132Pluralism Slippery Slopes and Democratic Public DiscourseTheoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 60 (137): 29-47. 2013.Agonist theorists have argued against deliberative democrats that democratic institutions should not seek to establish a rational consensus, but rather allow political disagreements to be expressed in an adversarial form. But democratic agonism is not antagonism: some restriction of the plurality of admissible expressions is not incompatible with a legitimate public sphere. However, is it generally possible to grant this distinction between antagonism and agonism without accepting normative stan…Read more
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552A Multirelational Account of TolerationJournal of Applied Philosophy 30 (3): 224-238. 2013.Toleration classically denotes a relation between two agents that is characterised by three components: objection, power, and acceptance overriding the objection. Against recent claims that classical toleration is not applicable in liberal democracies and that toleration must therefore either be understood purely attitudinally or purely politically, we argue that the components of classical toleration are crucial elements of contemporary cases of minority accommodation. The concept of toleration…Read more
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469Liberal Democratic Institutions and the Damages of Political CorruptionLes ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 9 (1): 126-145. 2014.This article contributes to the debate concerning the identification of politically relevant cases of corruption in a democracy by sketching the basic traits of an original liberal theory of institutional corruption. We define this form of corruption as a deviation with respect to the role entrusted to people occupying certain institutional positions, which are crucial for the implementation of public rules, for private gain. In order to illustrate the damages that corrupt behaviour makes to lib…Read more
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289Social injustice, essays in political theoryInternational Review of Sociology 22 (3). 2012.There are many situations and policies that strike us as unjust and make us look for alternatives. Yet in the absence of a clear definition, we may end up by equating injustice with everything that is evil in the world
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269PluralismIn A. C. Grayling Andrew Pyle (ed.), The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy, . pp. 2528-2530. 2006.Since the 1950`s in Britain, and perhaps in the rest of the world, the term pluralism is almost invariably associated with the name of Isaiah Berlin and his formulation of ‘value pluralism’. The core idea is that values (but also, on some interpretations, ends, duties and obligations) are irreducibly plural and heterogeneous, and nevertheless objective (...)
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123Risk and distributive justice: The case of regulating new technologiesScience and Engineering Ethics 16 (3). 2010.There are certain kinds of risk for which governments, rather than individual actors, are increasingly held responsible. This article discusses how regulatory institutions can ensure an equitable distribution of risk between various groups such as rich and poor, and present and future generations. It focuses on cases of risk associated with technological and biotechnological innovation. After discussing various possibilities and difficulties of distribution, this article proposes a non-welfarist…Read more
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119Political corruptionPhilosophy Compass 12 (12). 2017.The corruption of public officials and institutions is generally regarded as wrong. But in what exactly does this form of corruption consist and what kind of wrong does it imply? This article aims to take stock of the current philosophical discussion of the different senses in which political corruption is wrong in a general sense, beyond the specific negative legal, economic, and social costs it may happen to have in specific circumstances. Political corruption is usually presented as a patholo…Read more
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92Political corruption, individual behaviour and the quality of institutionsPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 17 (2): 216-231. 2018.Is the corrupt behaviour of public officials a politically relevant kind of wrong only when it causes the malfunctioning of institutions? We challenge recent institutionalist approaches to political corruption by showing a sense in which the individual corrupt behaviour of certain public officials is wrong not only as a breach of personal morality but in inherently politically salient terms. To show this sense, we focus on a specific instance of individual corrupt behaviour on the part of public…Read more
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81Exemptions for whom? On the relevant focus of egalitarian concernRes Publica 15 (3): 269-287. 2009.Granting differential treatment is often considered a way of placing some groups in a better position in order to maintain or improve their cultural, economic, health-related or other conditions, and to address persistent inequalities. Critics of multiculturalism have pointed out the tension between protection for groups and protection for group members. The ‘rule-and-exemption’ approach has generally been conceived as more resistant to such criticism insofar as exemptions are not conceded to mi…Read more
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68Risk imposition and freedomPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 15 (3): 261-279. 2016.Various authors hold that what is wrong with risk imposition is that being at risk diminishes the opportunities available to an agent. Arguably, even when risk does not result in material or psychological damages, it still represents a setback in terms of some legitimate interests. However, it remains to be specified what those interests are. This article argues that risk imposition represents a diminishment of overall freedom. Freedom will be characterized in empirical terms, as the range of un…Read more
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58Rules and exemptions: The politics of difference within liberalismRes Publica 15 (3): 213-217. 2009.In what ways might we best, and justly, allow for cohabitation between individuals and groups with plural conceptions of the good? Confronting this question, students of political philosophy in the past two decades have encountered a routine contrast between liberal universalism, with a focus on equal individual rights and uniform application of the law, and on the other hand various versions of a 'politics of difference'(...)
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46Teaching & learning guide for political corruptionPhilosophy Compass 13 (4). 2018.The Guide offers some ideas concerning readings, topics, and seminar prompts for a philosophy course on political corruption.
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38IntroductionJournal of Applied Philosophy 30 (3): 191-194. 2013.In attempting to clarify both the concept of toleration and its role in contemporary society several authors have interpreted it as based on the notion of respect for persons. Persons are due respect as moral agents and as such should be allowed to make their own choices, even if the content of those choices meets with our disapproval. According to a classical understanding of toleration, one can be said to tolerate something if one disapproves of it (this is commonly called the ‘objection comp…Read more
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37Fake News and the Responsibilities of CitizensSocial Theory and Practice 49 (4): 629-651. 2023.This article argues that citizens are responsible for the way they participate in political communication and debate, including for the quality of the pieces of information they post or disseminate on social media. This view contrasts with approaches that prioritise institutional responsibility in combating misleading information. Instead, in the article’s perspective, public and private institutional interventions are justified only when they aim at sustaining citizens in upholding their episte…Read more
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36Political Corruption: The Internal Enemy of Public InstitutionsOxford University Press. 2021."This book discusses political corruption and anticorruption as a matter of a public ethics of office. It shows how political corruption is the Trojan horse that undermines public institutions from within via the interrelated action of the officeholders. Even well-designed and legitimate institutions may go off track if the officeholders fail to uphold by their conduct a public ethics of office accountability. Most current discussions of what political corruption is and why it is wrong have conc…Read more
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19Present Risks, Future Lives: Social Freedom and Environmental Sustainability PoliciesThe Journal of Ethics 27 (2): 173-190. 2023.One topic of growing interest in the debate on intergenerational justice is the duty to respect the freedom of future generations. One consideration in favor of such a duty is that the decisions of present generations will affect the range of decisions that will be available to future people. As a consequence, future generations’ freedom to direct their lives may be importantly restricted such that present generations can be seen as taking future people’s lives into their hands and disempowering…Read more
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14Upholding public institutions in the midst of conflicts: the threat of political corruptionEthics and Global Politics 14 (3): 1961379. 2021.Scholars and international organizations engaged in institutional reconstruction converge in recognizing political corruption as a cause or a consequence of conflicts. Anticorruption is thus generally considered a centrepiece of institutional reconstruction programmes. A common approach to anticorruption within this context aims primarily to counter the negative political, social, and economic effects of political corruption, or implement legal anticorruption standards and punitive measures. We …Read more
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11The interactive wrong of political corruption: A reply to Warren, Santoro and FabreEuropean Journal of Political Theory. forthcoming.In this response essay, Ceva and Ferretti reply to their critics and clarify some key aspects of their book. Specifically, the discussion starts by elaborating on the notion of an ethics of office accountability, explaining that the specification of institutional norms of officeholders behaviour is the result of practices of officeholders' interaction (including democratic practices) and reflection. The second theme is the responsibility for political corruption. The authors emphasise the import…Read more
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9A Multirelational Account of TolerationJournal of Applied Philosophy 30 (3): 224-238. 2013.Toleration classically denotes a relation between two agents that is characterised by three components: objection, power, and acceptance overriding the objection. Against recent claims that classical toleration is not applicable in liberal democracies and that toleration must therefore either be understood purely attitudinally or purely politically, we argue that the components of classical toleration are crucial elements of contemporary cases of minority accommodation. The concept of toleration…Read more
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9La sfida della corruzione politica all’etica pubblica. IntroduzioneRivista Italiana di Filosofia Politica 4 5-17. 2023.The article presents political corruption as a problem of public ethics of institutions. It first explains the theory of institutional action that underlies the conception of political corruption as a deficit of “office accountability”. Having clarified the officeholders’ duties in their institutional capacity, it portrays political corruption as an “internal enemy” of public institutions. A discussion follows of the normative implications for an approach to anti-corruption based on the officeho…Read more
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8The Public Perspective: Public Justification and the Ethics of BeliefRowman & Littlefield International. 2018.This book argues that we can find the resources to build a public perspective if we make two commitments: to respect people as autonomous agents and to endorse a shared ethics of beliefs.
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1The Ethics of Anti-Corruption PoliciesIn Andrei Poama & Annabelle Lever (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Ethics and Public Policy, Routledge. 2019.The corruption of public officials and institutions is one of the most obvious problems that affects developed and developing countries alike. Because this view is largely shared, most current studies of this phenomenon—‘political corruption’—have been dedicated either to measuring or counteracting the negative political, social, and economic effects that this form of corruption may have in society. Albeit significant and urgent, these studies have distracted the attention of commentators from …Read more
Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Social and Political Philosophy |